


"There is no death!"

by Findswoman



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Force Choking, Gen, Introspection, Original Character Death(s), Original Force Ability, Original planet, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2019-01-27 08:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12577320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Findswoman/pseuds/Findswoman
Summary: A Jedi Purge survivor on an obscure planet reflects on his imminent end. Takes place somewhere between Order 66 and the Battle of Yavin. Written in 2015 in response to the TF.N Movie Quote Challenge, quote 24: “I am not afraid of dying. I’m afraid I haven’t been alive enough.” (Mr. Nobody, 2009). Thanks to Chyntuck and K'Tai qel Letta-Tanku for beta-reading.





	"There is no death!"

A man stood at the upper window of a large, half-timbered, banner-festooned building. He saw a tri-winged shuttle—sleek, angular, icy white—touch down on a landing pad far below. He watched as its landing ramp extended, as its hatch opened, and as a tall figure, helmeted and cloaked in jet black, disembarked. A few other figures followed, some in gray uniforms, some in white plasteel armor, and all made their way toward the entrance of the building.  
  
Wym Sternenkranz, chief defense advisor to the Chancellor of the Free World of Nydringia, was Jedi. He knew what had come, and who, and why.  
  
It was no surprise. For years now he had sensed the darkness that was creeping over the Galaxy, enveloping it slowly but surely. He had seen it dispatch his fellow Jedi one by one, his own Master and countless valued friends among them; he had felt in his bones how each of those deaths seemed to leach the very Light from the Force. Wym knew it was only a matter of time before that darkness would reach his own homeworld: Nydringia, far on the rimward edge of the Kathol Sector, quaint and distant yet proud and sovereign.  
  
Today it had come, and Wym Sternenkranz knew it had come for him. But not to kill him. For he had something the darkness wanted.  
  
Like most Jedi, he had been brought to the Jedi Temple as a mere youngling to be trained in the ways of the Force. While he was still quite young, his teachers had noticed in him a rare and unique Force ability: called _finta sempli_ in the ancient holocrons, it allowed him to cloak his Force signature at will—which not only prevented any other Force-user from sensing his presence in the Force but also allowed him to pass himself off as a non-Force-sensitive. This power, combined with natural resourcefulness and stealth, had served him well in many a mock battle, recon exercise, and away mission during his padawan years. The path of the Jedi Sentinel was the natural choice for him, and he was soon accepted for training as a Jedi Shadow with a prominent Shadow from his own homeworld, Hinrisch thur Mohlen.  
  
Wym often thought of Master thur Mohlen. The bearded, blue-eyed Shadow Master had taken great pride in his student’s unique ability. He never missed a chance to remind him of the immense value and rarity of _finta sempli_ , and cautioned him constantly never to let that power fall into the hands of the Dark Side—for _finta sempli_ was one of the few Force abilities that could be stolen from its possessor by Force Drain techniques. “Besides,” thur Mohlen was fond of saying, “who knows but it may save your life sometime?”  
  
That time came, in the form of the Great Purge. It was only two days after Wym’s advancement to knighthood that he had received a garbled holotransmission from his master—something about darkness and a frightening vision, concluding with a panicked warning to his student to flee to his remote homeworld and cloak himself. Only the day after that, while Wym was on a transport back to the Kathol Sector, Master thur Mohlen had met his own gruesome end, thrown by his own troops beneath the feet of his AT-TE.  
  
In his second-class berth Wym had felt thur Mohlen’s death slash the fabric of hyperspace as with a vibroblade. Nevertheless, he resolved to keep his master’s advice. The moment he had disembarked from the transport onto the cobbled streets of his homeworld’s capital of Nirnstadt, he had thrown the entirety of his powers into _finta sempli_. Once initiated, the cloak could be maintained for years if necessary—and so Wym had done. But staying cloaked for so long took effort, and his defenses certainly had slipped along the way. That he knew from the shuttle on the landing pad outside.  
  
And now, Wym wondered darkly, should he feel flattered, nay, honored, that none less than Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith—for the fearsome dark personage that had emerged from the shuttle could be no one else—had come to claim for himself the power of _finta sempli_? Should he, Wylhem Eberholdt Sternenkranz, swell with pride to think of the ways his own humble powers could help this mightiest of Sith Lords hunt down and root out the remaining Jedi—and perhaps even to overthrow the Emperor himself? Should he eagerly await the crushing grip of those gloved hands, the searing mental pain of the Force Drain that would rip this rare, precious ability from his conscious and subconscious alike? For so the Force had told him it would be. It was no more than he deserved, he mused, having failed his master so carelessly . . .  
  
But that same master had told him he must preserve his power at all costs. And now the only way do that was to join the Force himself.  
  
Wym’s hand strayed to the hilt of his lightsaber, then pulled quickly away again, as if it had touched something red-hot.  
  
He was afraid.  
  
Afraid? A Jedi afraid? Had not Master thur Mohlen taught him so long ago that a Jedi must not know fear? What was he afraid of, anyway? The fatal swath the luminous blade must soon cut through his body and soul?  
  
No, certainly not that. Like all good Jedi, Wym knew well that death was really no more than a joining with the Force. All who joined the Force added to its strength and to the strength of those who wielded it for good. And during these dark times, the Force needed all the strength it could get.  
  
But what, then, was making him so fearful? Wym gazed out the window beyond the landing pad at the picturesque antique skyline of Nirnstadt, his planet’s capital, from the step-gabled houses with their lush windowboxes, to the majestic stone chronotowers, and far beyond them to the rolling forested hills. A black-and-white magapi flew past the window, crying out “chak-chak!” in its comical scolding manner.  
  
It was for those houses, buildings, towers, and hills—even for that magapi, Wym realized—that he was afraid. If he sacrificed himself now, he would have no chance to fight for them, to save them and their inhabitants from the growing darkness of the Empire. For such was his duty—as a Jedi sworn to defend all living things, as a Jedi Shadow sworn to uproot the Dark Side in all its forms, and as his homeworld’s chief advisor on defense. He knew the Chancellor of the Free World of Nydringia counted on him as one of her best fighters. To give himself to the Force would be to betray her and her people, to turn all the beauty and goodness of his home over to be razed, subjugated, transformed into ugliness and terror. Would the gain within the Force be enough to cancel out that loss?  
  
And what of Glockel?  
  
Dear Glockel of the red-blond hair and laughing gray eyes, poor Wylhard’s daughter, only twelve Standard years old . . . he was afraid for her too. She was his niece, the orphan of his late brother, who, along with his wife, had been killed in a speeder crash when Glockel was only five. Since then she had lived in Nirnstadt’s largest orphanage. Although Wym’s Jedi vows of nonattachment and his official duties made it impossible for him to actually adopt her (for which he often secretly cursed both), he visited her often at the orphanage, and they corresponded regularly by holocube. He was the only family member she had left in the universe; could he really leave her all alone to the tender mercies of the Empire? He had heard gruesome stories of what Imperial soldiers did to the women and girls of the worlds they conquered . . .  
  
He too would lose if he cut himself down now. He would miss out on her growth to adulthood, on the new skills, knowledge, and awareness she was gaining daily—just next month she would be competing with the Nydringian delegation of the Junior Spacer Olympics, and he would not be there to cheer her on. He would never hear her silvery laughter again, nor see her bright smile light up the dusky orphanage halls, nor have the chance to wipe away her tears during those moments when the memory of her parents overcame her—for that still happened even after seven years. And never again would another living creature address him as “Uncle Wym”. . .  
  
No, it wasn’t death that he feared. It was that he had not yet lived his life to the fullest, not yet fulfilled the purposes for which the Force had placed him in the universe, both as a sentient being and as a citizen of the Free World of Nydringia. It was that those who depended on him—his people, his chancellor, Glockel—might never have the chance to fulfill the purpose of their own lives. All because of him and his selfish feelings of guilt.  
  
He was their shatterpoint, their confluence in the endless and infinite currents of the Force—and that alone was enough to make him feel afraid.  
  
Wym retreated from the window, assumed a meditative posture, and redoubled _finta sempli_.  
  
* * *  
  
“You have a lot of gall coming here, Lord Vader!” A human woman of late middle age, in official robes of brown and black and a tasseled black velvet flatcap, struggled in the grip of two Imperial stormtroopers; her brown eyes flashed daggers at her cloaked captor and the gray-uniformed officers surrounding him. “Hoping to add another system to your doddering old Emperor’s collection, are you? You are both deluded if you think Nydringia shall surrender without a fight.”  
  
“Chancellor Sigrada Vierdanck Tinctorius.” Darth Vader’s rasping synthesized voice dripped with disdain. “It is you who are deluded. Do not flatter yourself that the Empire takes any serious interest in your puny, backrocket world. No, worth more to me than all your quaint chronotowers and half-timbered hovels is the Jedi Wylhem Sternenkranz. Deliver him to me at once and I may spare you. Resist, and you shall suffer.”  
  
“Well, then, go look for him yourself,” Tinctorius retorted, cocking her head defiantly. The tassel of her cap twitched as she did so. “Certainly you can _sense his presence_ in the Force or some such poodoo, _neh_?”  
  
Vader bristled at this obviously deliberate jibe. “It is not worth your while to provoke me further, Chancellor,” he hissed. “You will hand him over now or suffer the consequences.”  
  
“Ah, ha ha!” Tinctorius laughed. “Never.”  
  
“So be it.” Vader raised his hand and gripped it into a fist. At once Tinctorius doubled over and began to gag violently.  
  
Just then the Sith Lord flinched violently, as if he had received a sudden blow to the head from behind. Reflexively he released his grip, causing Tinctorius to slump half-conscious onto the shoulder of one of the troopers. Then he looked up.  
  
A tall, slim, redheaded Human stood on a balcony high above, gripping before him a burning green lightsaber blade. His gray eyes glared fixedly down at the black-red orbs of Darth Vader’s helmet—which in turn gazed just as fixedly back at him. Several silent moments passed as the two stood there, looking at each other, motionless.  
  
Or were they? The Sith Lord noticed that the hands holding the green lightsaber were trembling—and that with each of those tiny tremors came a larger tremor in the Force. Pulses of uncertainty, of barely masked inner conflict—of fear unseemly in a Jedi—emanated from that solitary figure overhead. With each of those pulses an image flashed to life: blue eyes twinkling from the shadows of a hood, rolling tree-covered hills giving way to majestic peaks, a chattering black-and-white bird, happy citizens going about their daily business in the marketplace of Nirnstadt . . . then, finally, a young girl’s cheerful face, encircled by red braids . . .  
  
Vader paused a moment. There was something familiar to him about that fear, that conflict, those tremors. Even the images were familiar, though they had been different ones: the gentle-faced matron tortured at the hands of desert savages, the brown-eyed bride racked with the pain of birthing, two blue lightsabers flashing like shooting stars across fields of smoldering redness . . .  
  
And then, suddenly, the silence was shattered. Starlike radiance gleamed in Wym Sternenkranz’s eyes as he proclaimed in a clear, lyrical voice:  
  
“ _Eth geit kei Dod; eth geit nor de Makht!_ ”  
  
There was a single swoop of the green blade, and he collapsed to the floor.  
  
With unexpected alacrity, Vader ran up the grand staircase to the balcony. Then he stopped and gazed downward. Craning their heads to see, the troopers and officers noticed that he stood before what seemed to be a pile of this planet’s traditional male clothing: brown leather trousers, a homespun tunic, a dark-green embroidered vest. They saw their lord prod the pile with a heavy black boot; they heard a brief clatter as something metallic rolled out; and, finally, they shuddered as the same object—the hilt of a lightsaber—crashed noisily to the stone floor below. ¶

**Author's Note:**

> The ability of finta sempli is original to me and is described here: http://boards.theforce.net/posts/52075858.
> 
> Nydringia is an original planet and is meant to be sort of a Germanic, North European counterpart to Naboo. I imagine it as being designed around the aesthetics of the Northern Renaissance just as Naboo (one of my favorite GFFA locations) is designed around the aesthetics of the Italian Renaissance (and the classicism so revered by that renaissance). More will come in a fanon post at some point.
> 
> Jedi Shadows: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_Shadow
> 
> Stepped gable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow-stepped_gable  
> Half-timbering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_framing  
> Note that these links lead not to Wookieepedia but to Wikipedia; these are real-life architectural features characteristic of medieval and early modern buildings throughout Northern Europe.
> 
> Wym Sternenkranz’s last name means “wreath of stars.” It was meant not only to resonate with Hamlet’s Rosenkrantz but also to be somewhat analogous to GFFA names like Skywalker, Darklighter, Whitesun, etc.
> 
> Hinrisch thur Mohlen’s name is borrowed from a figure who cropped up in my dissertation research: one Hinrich thor Molen, who lived in Hamburg in the late decades of the sixteenth century, was an early teacher of Hieronymus Praetorius (1560–1629), a prominent North German organist-composer of the early seventeenth century.
> 
> “Eth geit kei Dod . . .”: The clue to the meaning of Wym’s final words is in the title of the story. ;)


End file.
